Caesarea Maritima was a fabulous city built by Herod the Great – the Herod that was the King of Judea when Jesus was born. It – not Jerusalem – was the capital of the Roman province of Judea. It sits right on the beautiful Mediterranean Sea, and Herod built the first man-made harbor there. The trading of goods and flow of people all came through it.

It had a large outdoor theater, a hippodrome where they would have chariot races and gladiator fights, and numerous temples including one to Emperor Tiberius. And Herod built his palace on a promontory reaching out into the Mediterranean, with the sea on three sides. He also had a large freshwater swimming pool in the middle of it. Very impressive.

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 Of all our modes of transportation, trains are unique: they go where the tracks take them, by design, not merely by schedule. The tracks set where they go. Freight trains, Amtrak, commuter railroads, subways, even streetcars go where they go. I’m not talking about schedules, planes and buses run on schedules. I mean the rails. They run on tracks. Those tracks are necessarily parallel. They go to the same places, but they remain distinct. And the cargo or the people go with them.

Jesus’s life has two distinct and related themes that run parallel, as straight and true as railroad tracks. One rail is the Kingdom of God. That is the culmination of God’s will. The other is the revelation of Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, who came into the world to accomplish his Father’s will. That is the culmination of Jesus’s will, which is his own and is aligned perfectly with his Father’s will. The Kingdom and Jesus at the Father’s right hand go together, parallel, forever.

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Many Christians have been raised by Christian parents in the church and have known God all of their lives, which is a truly beautiful blessing. Many Christians come to faith through an adult conversion experience, which can be sudden or it may grow over time. And many Christians fall somewhere in between, with some mix of belief, sense of the goodness of faith and moral grounding, and a growing understanding of its importance.

No matter who we are or where we fit into that complex stew, there comes a point of personal revelation that Jesus is Lord and we’ve got to respond to him.

The name John Newton may not ring much of a bell with many of us. But if I say that he wrote Amazing Grace, we recognize him as having written perhaps the most beloved Christian hymn of all time.

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